Month: November 2017

There are two kinds of colors used in Printing. Process colors are created by mixing cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow and black inks in varying percentages. Spot colors are special premixed inks that are used instead of, or in addition to, process inks. These spot colors come in a wide range of colors, including florescent and metallic. The most commonly used spot color are PMS (Pantone Color Matching System).

Spot colors provide the greatest color consistency. Spot colors are mixed using special formulas, no matter which printer you use, when you choose offset printing, your colors will match. When using spot colors with digital printing however, there will be slight variations, because each digital printer interprets and converts the spot color to CMYK differently. Colors on the digital press will look very different than colors printed on a conventional offset press. Digital printing is toner and offset uses ink. If you run a small run on a digital press and then order a much larger quantity that must be printed on a conventional offset press don’t expect the colors to look the same because it is two different processes and two different inks.

The types and number of colors you choose to use will greatly influence the cost of your printing project. It is always cheapest to print black/grayscale, followed by one color (usually a PMS color), then two color (usually PMS plus black or two PMS colors), and on up to specialty inks. Three colors are priced at the four color rate.

The picture in this blog post is made up of the four basic colors, and this is why the process is called four color printing.

Pure black is most commonly used for text, outlines, and smaller areas of black. Rich black is used for backgrounds or large areas of black, even in text. It appears darker and richer in contrast, because it mixes percentages of all four colors.

All blacks should be set to OVERPRINT in your artwork. Overprinting is any printing that is done on an area that has already been printed. For example, if you have text over a colored background, the text should be set to overprint. Shapes that do not overprint knock-out the background color, like a hole punch, leaving an empty space. This is especially troublesome for text, where the press operator must try to line up the letters precisely within the empty spaces. This can cause a “3D” effect on your text.

For your next four color printing/mailing project, call me Phyllis Burns at 584-2265 for a free estimate for printing, list acquisition if needed, mailing labor and estimated postage. You can also email me at phyllis@burnsmp.com.

There are a few things you should know about preparing press-ready files for printing. The first is setting up your document as the correct size. If your artwork is going to have BLEED – that is any element (color, images, text, etc.) that extends up to or past the edge of a printed page – your document needs to include an extra 0.125″ on each edge that will be trimmed off to give it a nice, clean appearance. To recap, your size will be the trim size plus bleed. Trim size is the final size of a printed piece after being cut from the sheet of paper that it was printed on. Say you wanted an 8.5×11 flyer with a picture border. The artwork you send us should be 8.75 x 11.25. If the artwork doesn’t have bleed, then the document will simply be the trim size.

Want more information and tips on printing and mailing? Email me at phyllis@burnsmp.com and I will send you a FREE resource guide for printing and mailing projects. Also our estimates are free and you can request an estimate at our website burnsmp.com or email me, Phyllis Burns. We are a printer who knows mailing and a mailer who knows printing. That is truly a great combination.

Burns Mailing & Printing is a 100% owned Women Business Enterprise, certified by the State of TN, certificate #072706-01

I like so many others, am thankful for my family, but not just my relatives but also my work family as well. I am blessed to have people who love me, a home, food on my table, freedom of worship and to live in a free country. I am thankful that I belong to the same church that my Mother took me to as a child and still go to church with folks that I went to first grade through high school. I am thankful for good neighbors who look out for each other. I am thankful for the beauty of East Tennessee with the Great Smoky Mountains in view and all the beauty that God created here.

Fats Domino had a song back in the 1960 era that was called “Blue Monday”, the lyrics went “blue Monday, I hate blue Monday”, well this has certainly been a blue Monday at Burns Mailing & Printing. It seems that a local electric company was doing work across the street on Friday afternoon and the broke the cable coming in to our office. We have Comcast and they were called as we did not know that the electric company was responsible. They did not come on Friday so when I came in this morning we had no internet, no phones and we could not even make the plates for our presses. So in essence we were out of business until after lunch. It got me to thinking about how dependent our business is on technology. We receive mailing lists, art files and customer correspondence by the internet and that is how we do business. I do love technology but when it is not working it really is a pain. We did get some cleaning and filing done today.

If you tried to reach us today, please pardon our being down and give us a call or shoot us an email. Phyllis Burns 865 584-2265 or phyllis@burnsmp.com